Maybe you remember this 1977 hit “I Was Born This Way”? Above, the song in its original version from Carl Bean; in the clubs, a remixed one. The recording from Bean arrived two years after Valentino originally released it. It’s been thirty-three years since the disco song, written by Chris Spierer and Bunny Jones about being A Gay, came out — well ahead of the Village People. Now Carl Bean is Archbishop Carl Bean, a gospel singer-cum preacher and AIDS activist at Unity Fellowship Church, a nationwide church he founded five years after he released this song. And writing with David Bitz, Bean has a new autobiography out chronicling his journey from sexually abused youngster in Baltimore to leading LGBT advocate. Fittingly, it is titled I Was Born This Way.

Bean chats about his book in this interview: “I don’t fear to be honest about who I am. I expect to be called upon to speak about it, challenged ,probably be baited, but I know that it will give a lot of people permission to be honest about who they are. God is love, and love is for everyone.”

A beautiful, moving story about a Black man doing heroic things for us. Yet I don’t expect anyone to bother with this story at all because it doesn’t feature a homophobic Black man. What a sad little community we have…

Jun 13, 2010 at 5:52 pm · @Reply ·

Jesse Helms

@James: Why don’t you hook up with this black man and get your freak on?

Ogre Magi is this Ape your pappy? Oops I forgot most you Negro men grew up without fathers in the household. This is why so many black men are “savages” and prey and kill on blacks and others. You blame your sorry life’s on the white man, but you are killing one another like animals around the United States. I say good riddance to you. I welcome gentification across the U.S.

“God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion…Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”